Pianists Excel at This!

Did you realize that when you learn to play the piano, you are also learning important life skills that will truly help you in many other areas of your life? 

Simply put: learning the piano teaches us how to use and master specific tools which can help us achieve our goals faster and accomplish more! 

Let's look at one of the most important life skills that learning the piano help us to master.

Can you guess what specific skill I'm talking about here?

• Playing different notes and different clefs at the same time with your right and left hands together
• Reading notes, rhythm, articulations, and key signatures at the same time
• Playing chords and lyrical lines at the same time
• Changing key signature and/or time signature in the middle of a piece
• Playing fast notes and slow notes together
• Playing loudly and then playing softly
• Playing Jazz and then playing classical

If you guessed that I'm talking about Multitasking, you're correct!

The very nature of music itself requires that we do more than one thing at a time, all the time!

Even if you were to play the exact same notes, rhythm, dynamics, and style in both hands at the same time, (they'd have to be an octave apart) you're still doing different things simultaneously. 

Our left side is controlled by our right brain, and our right side is controlled with our left brain. To use both hands at the same time, we're engaging our whole brain at one time, not just one side of it. 

Also; our right brains are more connected with abstract thinking and ideas that relate to the expression in music, and our left brains are more connected with math, practical problem solving and more technical thinking which correlates with more of the technical aspects of music, such as note reading and counting. 

How does this help you in the non-musical areas of your life?

We all multitask in our daily lives. Here are a few examples of things that we do all at the same time:

• Cooking, cleaning, and helping kids with homework 
• Driving, talking, and thinking about what you have to do at work
• Eating, checking email, paying bills
• Listening to someone talk, thinking about what you want to do later, ordering food

We also have to multitask in work projects, school projects, job interviews, and just about everything we do. 

While our brains are wired to perform different tasks at the same time, the individual makeup of our brain's wiring has an affect on how well we carry out multitasking and how well we process the information to get these tasks done. 

Some of us are better at multitasking left brain concepts than right brain ones; or visa versa. 

One person may be better at processing emotional information while another will be able to process literal input better. This is actually true with most of us, since we tend to be stronger on one side than the other. 

Playing the piano sort of makes us use both sides of our brains without us realizing it. We're focused on what each hand is doing rather than on how we're processing the information. It happens "behind the scenes" an in an organic and intuitive way. 

What happens when we walk away from the piano and into the other part of our lives is that we're naturally functioning from both sides of our brains more than we were before we played. We can handle those other multitasking demands easier without even trying. We've done the work at our keyboards already!

Try observing different areas of your life that require you to multitask a lot.

Especially look at the times you've felt challenged or overwhelmed by the information or the task at hand. See if your ability to function in that area has changed any since you started playing the piano.

Over time, you will notice a change. It may be subtle at first. Remember that these changes came about through a nonverbal activity and are coming from the subconscious area of your brain. 

Playing the piano is like taking a vitamin supplement to increase your brain's ability to successfully and easily multitask and utilize much more of your brain power overall. So play your piano daily to keep your brain fit and working for you in all areas of your life!

​Stay tuned to LessonsOnTheWeb to learn much more and achieve your dream of playing the piano!